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California’s pending bill, AB 2109, would require parents exercising a non-medical vaccine exemption for their children to get a health care practitioner’s signature on a form signifying that the doctor has given the parent vaccine risk-benefit information, and to provide a separate statement signed by the parent saying that the parent got the risk-benefit information from the doctor. There are practical, financial, ethical and legal problems with this bill. A formal legal memorandum that goes into detail is available here. CA residents are encouraged to present this memorandum to their state legislators, in person if possible to help ensure that they actually hear your concerns and take you seriously, to express their opposition to this bill. In the meantime, a summary of key points follows.

First, since doctors are increasingly refusing to see exempt children in their practices, we must assume that many doctors will refuse to sign exemption forms or will charge high fees for doing so, to discourage or prevent exemptions. Ironically, doctors’ aggressive stance against exempt kids in their practices is scientifically unsound. The 5% – 15% of vaccinated kids who are not immune greatly outnumber the 1% – 2.5% of exempt kids. Furthermore, exempt kids can acquire natural immunity, and without even getting sick, so exempt kids may be immune without vaccines. Doctors have no trouble treating the many non-immune vaccinated kids, so the agenda underlying their discrimination of exempt children is clearly not based on public health concerns, despite their disingenuous chants to the contrary.

Second, healthcare providers’ vaccine risk-benefit information can’t address the fundamental concerns of non-medical exemptions. Philosophical exemption concerns include the fact that vaccines cause permanent disability and death, and doctors can’t tell you which children will be disabled or killed by a vaccine. Religious objections concern a higher power not subject to medical opinion. (While CA’s exemption does not refer explicitly to religious beliefs, CA statutory construction law dictates that the exemption applies to those with personal religious beliefs. See the memorandum for a complete legal analysis.) A healthcare provider’s risk-benefit information is irrelevant to these philosophical and religious concerns. Therefore, AB 2109 would put healthcare providers in the unreasonable position of trying to use their medical opinion about vaccines to “overrule God” and to oppose parents’ non-quantifiable concerns about their child’s risk of being permanently disabled or killed by a vaccine. Furthermore, as most providers will mistakenly claim that exemptions create serious health risks, parents who sign the required letter or affidavit could later be accused of exercising poor judgment for their child, possibly even medical neglect. However, this belief is contrary to the legislative presumption that the exercise of an exemption poses no significant health risk (or else the legislature would not have enacted the exemption law in the first place), and the widely accepted herd immunity theory which tells us that all need not be immune for all to be protected. That is, healthcare providers are often unscientifically biased in their pro-vaccine views.